In color printing, a printer prints input data onto a tangible medium, such as paper, by converting colors in the input data to a color space of the printer. A CMYK printer, for example, has a color space that is used to represent the input data with various levels of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink or toner. Before the input data is printed, the input data is converted to the color space of the CMYK printer.
Generally, the input data is prepared for printing by configuring the input data in a print job that directs a color management system to manage the color printing. For example, the color gamut of the printer may be smaller than that of the incoming input data. A host system may therefore configure the input data in a print job via specialized formats known as page description languages (PDLs) that direct a color management system to map the incoming input data to the color gamut of the printer. In doing so, the PDL encodes the input data such that it may be translated into a rasterized format for the printer before it is printed.
The PDL may also direct the color management system to conserve ink/toner during the printing process. For example, in CMYK printing, cyan, magenta, and yellow ink/toner is generally more expensive than black ink/toner. The color management system may therefore compute certain CMYK replacement values for the converted CMYK input data so as to reduce the amount of cyan, magenta, and/or yellow ink/toner being used during printing while maintaining an aesthetically/perceptually similar printed image.
One method of color management is a process known as “Force K” that replaces all black and gray color values of a converted image with various levels of black ink/toner (i.e., K color values). In this process, the color management system employs ICC color profiles to convert all color values of input data to a color space of an output device. Thereafter, the color management system identifies the black color values converted by the ICC color profiles and replaces them with K color values. Thus, all levels of cyan, magenta, and yellow in those black and gray color values are set to zero during CMYK printing, which as mentioned reduces the overall cost of printing.
However, not all print jobs are alike. In many instances, customers create print jobs with input data from devices (e.g., imaging device data) that do not specify any type of color management. Accordingly, the printer is tasked with printing the input data without instructions for performing color conversion. For example, a customer may generate a print job having CMYK input data without specifying any type of color management to reduce various levels of cyan, magenta, and/or yellow ink/toner. The CMYK input data may be generated directly from an input device or generated from a color conversion of the color space thereof. Once received by the printer, the printer simply applies various levels of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink/toner to the print medium as directed by the CMYK input data. Thus, gray and black color values of the input data are often printed with levels of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink/toner when they could have been simply represented with various levels of black ink/toner. Such results in the unnecessary use of the more expensive cyan, magenta, and yellow ink/toner.